A Twinkle in Your Eye
by Whovian overload River Song
Summary: "Wait, did you say another nursery?" "Mmm-hmm," River confirmed. "Like, for another baby?" "Mmm-hmm." "A... hypothetical baby?" PART THREE- takes place between Clara and Sister


"We don't have enough room in this house for another nursery. I think we should consider moving," River murmured, looking over the local paper as the Doctor came through the front door and toed off his heavy winter boots.

He'd just come from a run to the market. It took almost twenty minutes to walk to the nearest town and seeing as how the TARDIS was feeling moody today, it meant that the Doctor had to trudge down by foot in the cold and find what passed for milk and eggs at Ceq'ar Knur (or Ceq's Market as River sometimes called it). Darillium's human tourists were more plentiful when the sun was up, but the store clerk at Ceq'ar kept a section of the store marked 'Earth Food' open year round.

With the Doctor out, an unskilled River had to attempt to make breakfast for their daughter, Clara, without the aid of neither ingredients nor husband. Milkless tea and a lumpy bowl of oatmeal currently being devoured by the three-year-old was the result of this. As the bowl contained more parts maple syrup than actual grain, Clara had no complaints about it.

The Doctor hung up his coat up and put a full paper grocery bag on the kitchen island next to his cold coffee as he shook off the outside cold. He had left his drink on the counter almost an hour ago when he realized he needed to go out and begrudgingly did. He now took the mug and soniced it warm again as he tiredly responded, "Yes, dear. Sounds fine."

He leaned his back against the side of the island nearest his wife, facing where she and their daughter sat in the nook where the proper table was. He took a sip of his coffee. River sipped her milkless tea, taking her eyes away from the newspaper and looking at him expectantly. Clara snagged the paper with a sticky hand so she could imitate her mother and pretend to read it, as she did most mornings.

The Doctor took another sip. River watched him suddenly freeze and snap eyes open. "Wait, did you say another nursery?"

"Mmm-hmm," River confirmed.

"Like, for another baby?"

"Mmm-hmm."

"A... hypothetical baby?"

"Mmm-mmm." She shook her head, her expression remaining patient as she filled in the gaps for her husband. "Not hypothetical."

"Oh." He blinked at her, taking another sip of coffee, though at this point he was sure he didn't need the caffeine anymore. "Oh."

"So," River plucked the newspaper back from Clara, putting it flat on the table, open to the realtor section she was looking at before. She hadn't looked in this section of the paper since her first year on the planet when the Doctor suggested that they could have an inanimate and linear place to live in if they wanted. She remembered her pleasant surprise that Darillium not only had a newspaper but a housing section in it as well. Some things never changed, no matter the planet. "Moving?"

"Mine," Clara frowned crossly at the paper, which was now out of reach of her hands.

"Mine, please." River corrected instinctively. Clara had a habit of ignoring what the toddler called 'nice people words', which meant River now had the habit of adding them to her daughter's sentences for her.

"Mine, please?" Clara tried, though her tone wasn't much improved.

River deemed her manners good enough and slid the back leaf of the paper out from the first. It happened to be the one with the comic section, to which Clara gave up a grin and took it with no further complaints—yes, some things never changed.

The Doctor eased into the nook next to his wife, River scooting over so he'd fit. "Are you sure?" he asked.

"About moving?" She arched an eyebrow, though kept her eyes on the paper and her tone easy-going.

"About the baby."

"Mmm-hmm." She nodded simply in reply to both his verbal question and the one he hadn't said out loud.

Following up on his unspoken request, the Doctor touched the back of her head and closed his eyes, searching his wife's mind. He wasn't looking for a memory, though he was searching by memory for something he'd only seen about four years ago when River was still pregnant with Clara.

They'd been in the TARDIS library. The Doctor was tucked onto the couch with his guitar with River adjacent. She rested her feet on his legs, a huge stack of books by her side. This had been a more common ritual when they had more time on their hands before Clara had arrived. The books that day was everything River had managed to scrape up on Gallifreyan physiology, her worry about her upcoming due date kicking in.

The Doctor stopped playing his guitar when he noticed the crease in his wife's brow. She looked up at him and caught his eye before quietly showing him the page that had her attention. It was some propaganda about first-year developmental differences between the loom-born and womb-born children and why the Looms should be discontinued, but he easily found the phrase that had intrigued her: Maternal psychic link.

"Should I have one of those?" She'd asked, to which she earned a nod from her husband. She reached out her hand to him and he took it, letting her invite him into her mind.

Their memories blended together as emotions crashed into each other, then synced and settled. The telepathic bridge may have been something formed with the brain, but the Doctor could feel it all over his body. River's sorrow burrowed itself into his knees, her happiness sat on his shoulders. Her anger bubbled irritably by his elbows and her worry bit his ears. There were more feelings than that, of course. Complicated and messy emotions completely covered him and fought for space as they changed their minds about where exactly they wanted to be.

He was a mosaic, utterly surrounded by River.

I think have the link. I just didn't know what it was. Her voice echoed all over, tingling like rain in the air. The cocoon of her around him flowed like water as River conducted all the pieces to arrange, leaving a hole right in the middle of his abdomen.

Light emerged from the space. There wasn't actually light anywhere, he knew that, but the feeling of warmth shone out, moving exactly how light would. This wasn't from River, something in him knew that. The warmth reached out in a shimmering display, settling between the two of them.

This energy was fluid and changing, stringy and uncertain as it shifted in front of them. It emitted what could only be described as a telepathic aroma of newness. Newness was not a feeling the Timelords were familiar with; both of them had decades upon decades stacked on their shoulders. Newness was, in the case of this warm, bodiless essence, a mix of curiosity, anticipation, and something a bit silvery.

Buzzing between them dispersed, retreating up the Doctor's arms and humming at the base of his neck. River encompassed him once more, before pulling all the bits of herself back into her own mind.

They opened their eyes and stared at each other, hands still clasped tightly together.

"I think it's going to be a girl." River had said at the Doctor's silent awe.

Here and now, in the nook of the kitchen where the three Songs sat for breakfast, River mentally took her husband's hand and lead him through her mindscape as she did before. It was almost a rule of telepathic links that one should never navigate without the host to guide them, even in the case of the Songs who were perhaps the most experienced with psychic links than anyone else in the quadrant, and quite probably the only ones who had the genetics to be able to do it anyways.

Clara looked curiously at her parents, who'd both grown still in concentration. "Mummy?" Most of the psychic sharing her parents did happened in their own bedroom after she was asleep, so Clara wasn't accustomed to what it was supposed to look like.

River mechanically reached out her real hand, which the little girl took happily and joined her parents' exploration.

Clara, being only three years and five months old, was not accustomed or very capable of thinking with anything very abstract, and the mind of the 200+-year-old partial Gallifreyan was made entirely of intangible concepts. However, Clara's own mind, in an attempt to make sense of things, managed to conjure up something for her to see anyways.

The three of them were sitting in purple.

It was a dark purple that was more blue than red and seemed to absorb light while still reflecting the indigo color, creating a two-dimensional effect. It was lumpy looking though soft like cotton except there were no stray fibers anywhere, just flowing, definite lines separating the ground and horizon. It moved when Clara moved, like a slow motion water bed, though she was sure it wasn't water. She couldn't look directly at it without the purple dissolving into a nearly black, static thing.

River and the Doctor sat on either side of the girl on the blanket of soft, purple sea. The Doctor was a roughly person shaped cluster of nebula, stars and a reddish soil with no defining features, but somehow Clara still knew it was her father. Her mother, equally unearthly, seemed to be made of dark sand, wind, a watery substance Clara knew wasn't actually water, but couldn't deduct further than that. None of those elements where mixing and they seemed both moving and still, which made River hard to look at without getting dizzy.

Clara wasn't sure what she was made of. She felt like herself in all the right places, though looking at her own hand in front of her face—well, she didn't see anything when she did, as if she were invisible.

Her parents were both looking up at a starless night sky. It was too dark to see their faces, and they didn't really have faces to begin with, but Clara knew they were looking up, so she did too.

A silvery... something appeared in the sky. It wasn't out of nowhere, Clara knew. River had called it from someplace outside of here. It looked a bit like the northern lights, though it wasn't as runny and there was only the one streak of color instead of many. It wasn't very bright, and it whispered silently in a way that made Clara feel a bit tingly in the back of her head.

She took what passed for her parents' hands as the silvery thing came down from the sky. It didn't move and they didn't move, but somehow it was just close. Clara wanted to touch it, but her parents were sitting still— in that strange shifting material way—so she figured now wasn't the time.

The silvery bit wiggled a little, in the same non-moving, dizzying sense. Too many things in here did that, which was getting heavy for Clara's little mind. She put her 'head' on River's form and suddenly about a dozen different feelings that didn't belong to her filled her until her skin crawled with them and her head started to ache. With something she could only describe as a pop, Clara burst out of her mother's mind with force and back into the kitchen.

Clara blinked, disoriented.

The instability that resulted from Clara's swift exit dissolved the rest of the telepathic connection, bringing the others back as well. River and the Doctor opened their eyes and exchanged slightly surprised looks at finding themselves back in reality so soon.

River put a hand to her head, wincing slightly. "Clara, my love, next time let me know you want to leave so I can help you." As it were, Clara had startled herself into unexpectedly yanking her mind apart from River's—this often felt like a big whack on the head for the hosting mind.

The Doctor looked over at his daughter with amusement. "Alright, my star?"

Clara nodded, shaking off dizziness and the feeling of other people in her head. "Who was that?"

"That was your sister," River murmured with a satisfied smile, ignoring telepathically induced headache.

"I have a sister?" Clara looked even more confused than before and glanced around as if someone might come in and announce themselves as so.

"You will," River laughed softly. "In about… ooh, 37 weeks?"

"About nine months," the Doctor clarified.

Clara stared at her mother, willing to get her brain to think faster. "A big sister or a little sister?"

This the Doctor laughed at. "A little one, my love. It doesn't work the other way around."

"Oh," Clara said in a tone that she hoped sounded like she was thinking, but probably sounded just as confused as before. "Why was she silver?"

"Silver?" Both her parents looked confused at this. Their experience was the same as it had been in the library four years ago, so the baby's conscience manifested more as a feeling than anything they could see.

"The silver thing. That was her…? She made me have feelings and I don't want them because they're hers and they don't belong in my head." Clara was out of breath by the end of all those words, hoping they were strung in the right order to make her parents understand.

"That's how it's supposed to feel like when someone else's mind connects to yours." the Doctor promised, beginning to understand.

"I was only in mummy's mind," She argued.

"Mummy's mind is connected with the baby's. When you came in, mummy acted like a bridge and connect you two so you could feel the baby's emotions."

The girl was still puzzled. "But why was she silver?"

"I'm not quite sure, but she won't be silver when she comes out," he assured.

Clara continued to look even more bewildered. "Comes out?" She was sure that if her little sister arrived at the door in nine months, that would be coming into the house, not coming out of anything. "Does she come in a box?"

River sighed, though it was a happy sigh, and looked at her husband. "Shall you do this one or should I?"

"Do you still have that anatomy book?" he asked.

River nodded, looking back at Clara. "Come, my love. We're going to wash you up, then have a look at a picture book."

Easily swayed at the mention of a picture book, Clara wiggled off her chair and followed her parents to go wash up.


End file.
